Fortytwo

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Thanks Gary! It turned out better than I visualized. It was in color, of course–I am not a cat–and I was shooting black and white so the lines and angles are cleaner and starker here than how they were.

Well, it worked great. I love black-and-white photography, when it makes good use of scales and contrasts and angles. But your cat comment made me curious: I hadn’t realized cats are color-challenged, relative to us.

I say “challenged” because what I’m reading suggests it’s over-simplified just to say they’re “color-blind”. They’re mostly blind to colors in the red-green spectrum, with just a few hints of green creeping in. Otherwise they see some color, but it’s a pretty washed-out version. Plus, they can’t focus sharply on objects more than 20 feet away. Their view of the daylight world is therefore blurred and dreary, compared to ours, even though their field of vision is wider.

Their night vision, on the other hand, is far better than ours, as is their ability to detect tiny micro-movements and flickers. This suggests they’re well adapted to nocturnal hunting. Here’s a “Wired” article with artist-conception photos:https://www.wired.com/2013/10/cats-eye-view/

From the information there, I suspect that the car you photographed, as seen by a cat, would look very much like your photo. It’s close enough to be within the field of focus, and any color in the image would be attenuated, if not missing entirely. But close enough!

I have often wondered how bleak the world must seem to other animals, something you mentioned too. Usually the thought accompanies another thought that how do these animals even survive without being able to see things properly. But then I am reminded how difficult it is to catch or hit a fly and I realize that even though they don’t see the way we do, they see pretty damn well! Which brings us to the point, that if our vision is not really that important from a survival point of view–because clearly flies, frogs and cats all do fairly well even with “worse” sight–then there must be a non-utilitarian reason for our complex, colorful sight.
This discussion might be more meta than I thought it would be.

Well, my conjecture, Dev, is that the world as seen by other creatures may not be at all bleak. Merely different. Even if I’m guessing wrong, I doubt it bothers them: One can’t miss what one hasn’t experienced. You and I see only a tiny sliver of the whole electromagnetic spectrum. If we could see across the whole range, the universe would look wildly different. We’d see radio and x-ray and infrared and gamma bursts — possibly in colors we can’t currently imagine. Possibly with sensory ramifications other than color, that we also can’t currently imagine. How cool might that be?

Compared with an eagle, human beings are more or less blind. Aside from that, I’ve wondered whether the supposed visual limitations of certain animals are actually adaptations to other uses of the visual cortex, via synesthesia. (We’ve discussed that before — the capacity to experience sounds as smells or colors, textures as temperatures, etc.) I was recently stunned to learn that bats aren’t blind (http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/02/bats-are-not-blind/) — they mostly see fine, even though they use sonar to “echo-locate” insects etc. in the dark. It’s currently surmised that flying bats use their sonar to generate “visual maps” of their surroundings: That is, their reflected-sound feedback affects their optic nerves, as well as their auditory ones! Thus they “see” what they hear. Since different textures modulate sound waves differently, this may mean they “see” different echoes as different colors: A fellow fuzzy bat may “look” red; a mosquito may “appear” as a blue spark.

Dogs (we’re told) can’t see very well, and also are partly or perhaps mostly color-blind. But a dog’s sense of smell is 25,000 times more sensitive that that of a human. With their nostrils constantly twitching, they’re cataloging the world around them, presumably picking up intensity-and-direction-and-location cues along with the various scents. What if these dogs (using synesthesia) actually are organizing these smell-inputs into 3D color images within their visual cortex? This “map” would overlay the strictly optical component, fleshing it out with unimaginable richness. (Unimaginable, that is, to most human beings, though not to a dog.)

If the visual centers of other creatures (or even just some of them) ever get “borrowed” in such ways, that might explain why they haven’t developed more discriminating optics. Visual acuity in terms of light-focus might actually impair the creature’s overall “sight”.

Even if all this speculations is off base, I agree there must be a reason for our complex, colorful sight. What is it? Don’t ask me; how would I know? But I might suggest that it contributes to human artistic and creative endeavors, which in turn contribute not only to human well-being, but to human survival. One could thus argue that there’s a Darwinian pressure in that direction, once human evolution has crossed certain other thresholds.

Yes, I think that is correct. The world as seen by other creatures is different, not bleak. I should have known better.

Reading your first paragraph I am reminded that I read a similar argument from the famous Hindu monk of the 19th century Swami Vivekananda where he says pretty much what you said, that if we had even one more “sense”, then the universe would appear vastly different to us. It is silly (of me) to say that humans experience it at a higher level and other animals’ experience is bleaker. A bee could say the same to me, since it can potentially see UV light that I can’t see. Or a bat. Or a dog. Even human children can hear higher frequency sounds that adults can no longer hear. This of course leads to the philosophical conclusion that our senses delude us and are not to be trusted. They show us an incomplete picture and sometimes even an inaccurate one.